. >> the defensive marriage act passed in 1996 which says forfederaltaxandother federal purposes, marriage shall be defined only between a man and a woman. so a couple of different federal court of appeals in the second circuit and the first circuit have struck down that aspect of doma, saying that the federal government has to treat same-sex married couples from those states that recognize same-sex marriage as married for federal purposes. so i think a lot of people properly speculate that the supreme court will have to take at least one of these doma cases, because when lower courts are struck down in a federal statute, that's a big deal, and we have to get a resolution of that. whether the supreme court says at the same time it's going to go ahead and take the prop 8 case alongside or whether it will take a doma case and sit on the prop 8 case for some periods of months and then resolve the doma case and see how it feels about prop 8 after that is a more difficult question. >> certainly the court hasn't wanted to go too far ahead of what they see as a national consens consensus, but it's safe